The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.

When she came to my home earlier this week to speak to an NGO crowd, she slipped off her shoes and stepped up on a footstool, perspiring but indefatigable. Wearing a sleeveless print dress, she showed off a green tattoo on each upper arm. “I got them when I turned 50,” she said, to testify to her cool.

Today’s feminists are women of all colors, many from immigrant or struggling families, who wait until 30 or later to develop their dreams, and mentor other women. Ahead of PBS’s documentary ‘Makers: Women Who Make America’ airing tonight, Gail Sheehy updates feminism.

What would Betty Friedan say, 50 years after publishing The Feminine Mystique, if she were to read Stephanie Coontz in The New York Times Sunday Review, writing: “The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall”?

During the run up to the Iraq War, Tee Hanible, a young Marine working a desk job, asked to be deployed. It meant leaving her child behind. What makes a mother of a 3-year-old girl feel such a powerful need to sacrifice for her country?

From Newsweek via The Daily Beast, November 2012

By Gail Sheehy

“You’re not Marine Corps material—you won’t make it.”

That was Tawanda Hanible’s brother, Lindell, running down the sister who had always shown him up in school. Lindell was two years older and already a Marine. He told “Tee,” as she was called, “you’re too girly.” He forgot that she was also stubborn as a fence post.

Bill Clinton is older and frailer now, but his stunning speech in support of Obama—and the rapturous reception it received—shows he remains a charismatic and revered figure who, along with Hillary Clinton, rises ever higher in public standing and regard.

Helen Gurley Brown told women they didn’t have to compromise: They could have the career, the man, the family, and a great sex life. As the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, she defended this agenda enthusiastically for more than 30 years. Judy Woodruff and writer Gail Sheehy remember the life and legacy of Gurley Brown.

The pioneering Cosmopolitan editor and author of ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ encouraged women not to give up on love, men, sex, or

using their feminine wiles—but also boosted their self-confidence to take charge of their own lives.

I have always thought of Helen Gurley Brown as the female version of a Horatio Alger hero—the American dream of a self-made woman. Like Alger’s fictional heroes, but real, she started with nothing: a father who died early, an impoverished mother, and a crippled sister she needed to support. What she lacked in money for higher education she made up for in hard work and self-discipline, bucking the sexist workplace of the 1950s and ’60s by starting as a secretary and toiling through 17 jobs before she achieved her dream of becoming an editor, at the age of 42.

Daniel Rodriguez joined the Army when his home life collapsed. His parents split. His father dropped from a heart attack. He was 18 and on the runty side for a high school football player, but with a dream of playing at a Division I college.

Three weeks after burying his father, the angry teen made his way to an Army recruitment center. Like so many of today’s volunteers, he was looking for a new home, discipline and the directions for becoming a man.

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a four-part series on Passages to Well-Being, an exploration of what contributes to high well-being in women ages 45 to 55, the largest demographic in America today.

Why, then, did we choose Mary Claire for this series on “the happiest woman” at midlife?

Here’s the catch: To reach the well-being ideal for a woman in midlife â€” 45 to 55 â€” you need to have launched your last child by the time you reach age 50. And Mary Claire is on track for that.

“When I turned 40, I swear, it struck midnight and I gained 5 pounds!” Mary Claire Orenic confided to me. When she complained to her gynecologist, he gave her the straight skinny: “From now on, if you do everything the same as the year before, you will gain 3 pounds a year.”

“When I turned 40, I swear, it struck midnight and I gained 5 pounds!” Mary Claire Orenic confided to me. When she complained to her gynecologist, he gave her the straight skinny: “From now on, if you do everything the same as the year before, you will gain 3 pounds a year.”

“I’ve never worked less than 40 hours a week,” acknowledges Mary Claire Orenic, our poster woman for high well-being at age 50. “In my 20s and 30s, I sometimes worked twice that.” She still managed to raise a child, keep a marriage happy, and start a new business. How did she pull that off?